Stalin set about modernizing farming through a policy known as collectivization. The peasants were required to join their farms together and work the land collectively as State employees. Large scale methods of production would be used with the aid of machinery. Each collective farm was to be supported by a motor tractor station where a pool of tractors were to be hired out to the collective. The peasants would work the collective under State control. The State could, therefore, control the supply of food to the cities and get enough foreign capital to industrialize. The first stage was collectivization by example. Peasants were encouraged to voluntarily join collectives. The policy didn't work. Few joined because the peasants wanted to own their own land. Therefore, very few collectives were set up.

Reactions to collectivization

When exhortation didn't work, Stalin adopted a policy of forced collectivization. He began by trying to force food from the peasants. Young Party workers went round the country looking for food. They believed that the peasants were hoarding and hiding their food hoping thereby to force up the prices. Any food they found was confiscated for the Party. There were riots by the peasants against this forced requisitioning of food. Hundreds of party workers were assassinated. There were 1,400 reported cases of terrorist acts in 1928 alone.

There was even less food the following year, 1929. Food had to be rationed in the towns. Stalin decided to wage all out war on the peasants. Naturally he blamed them for the shortage of food and for frustrating his will. He was particularly venomous towards the richer peasants, the kulaks. He believed they were deliberately hoarding food and keeping the towns short. The kulaks, he said:

"are the sworn enemies of the collective farm movement. We are to eliminate them as a class ... when the head is cut off one does not mourn for the hair."

Stalin began to use the language of war - the peasants, he claimed, had opened a second front, a livestock and grain front, against the State. To ensure that collectivization was successful he decided to smash the kulaks as a class.

No one ever defined what a kulak was. To Stalin it was the richer peasant. To the over enthusiastic Communist Party worker who wanted to carry out Stalin's policy, it was anyone who opposed collectivization. Being branded a kulak by a neighbour was often enough to ensure your expulsion from the village. In the beginning, Stalin talked of 5 or 6 million kulaks. Years later, when speaking to Churchill, he talked of 10 million.

The decision to collectivize was taken in a hurry. No proper surveys of the country were carried out. This was to prove disastrous. To go from a system of privately owned small farms to State owned large farms and still ensure adequate food levels required careful planning. The government wanted change at breakneck speed - in some areas they wanted complete collectivization in 18 months.

In this war against the peasants, the government had all the big battalions they used the police, the secret police, and the army.

Nevertheless, the resistance of the peasants was greater than expected. The response of the peasants was generally hostile. Hostility became open resistance and rebellion. The peasants refused to donate any food to the Government, so they ate it in an orgy of feasting.

The results of collectivization

Likewise, to frustrate the Government, the peasants didn't plant anything for the following year. The new collectives were supposed to bring the advantages of the economies of scale with modernized farming methods. However, new tractors could not replace the slaughtered draught horses - half were killed. The figures are staggering: the USSR had 34 million horses in 1929 but only 17 million in 1933. In the same very short period 45% of its cattle and 60% of its sheep and goats were destroyed.

This was a very confusing time for the peasants. Villagers who refused to co-operate with collectivization were forcibly removed from their villages. They were then herded into cattle trucks and dumped in the inhospitable north. Others were forced into labour camps where they provided slave labour for some of Stalin's difficult schemes.

When the peasants were evicted, the Party officials - often from the cities - had no idea how to farm. Crops were not harvested properly or seed sown in time.

There was chaos. With slaughtered cattle, bad harvesting, and burned crops there was famine again in the USSR. Millions starved. Stalin refused to accept international aid. Cannibalism appeared in some areas.